Slipshod Paradise

Running the shadows with the worst of 'em.

Rescuing Rock Salt

Occupy Gondor!

13/09/72

In the aftermath of his work bringing down the Bionic Army, JC hacked into Dr. Ivanov’s office node to find out what would be happening to his latest patients. Dashet and Dragoon seemed to be fine, having plentiful assets to cover their expenses. However, what funds Rock Salt may have had proved insufficient to protect him from Dr. Ivanov’s loss-prevention solutions. If he did nothing, JC and his new teammates would be directly responsible for Rock Salt being chopped apart and sold for scrap by an organlegger called Big Mike.

Taking a closer look at the security in place, JC quickly determined that he would need assistance in extracting Rock Salt from his precarious predicament. To handle the physical extraction efforts, JC contacted his friend Lakdawala and convinced him to find a likely Johnson to arrange a run against Dr. Ivanov.

14/09/72

While waiting for Lakdawala to provide results, JC worked to locate a suitable medical facility to repair Rock Salt. After analyzing several possibilities, JC picked out the Chesapeake CrashCart Medical Facility as the optimal location and immediately sought March’s help in hacking the facility. Given the circumstances, March could see no alternative to running against his former Corpmates.

After some basic preparations, the two of them begin a careful game of cat and mouse with the CrashCart facility’s Matrix security, slipping past the first layer of firewalls and establishing secret accounts in case they found themselves in need of returning. It took the better part of the day, but together they compromised much of the system without making the security team suspect more than a graphical glitch or two.

March’s sprite discovers a mouse-icon in Patient Records which it insists on hunting down and killing prior to providing March the information needed to create a PlatinumLife account for Rock Salt, with JC as his cyberware specialist. Additionally, the sprite discovers that Donavan’s friend Shadow had been a patient here before, for the implanting of a data filter.

Meanwhile, in the Inventory & Facilities sub-node, JC develops a wish-list of betaware for himself and Rock Salt. They establish their own controls over the Internal Communications network, ensuring that any questions about JC’s credentials will be answered by March.

Dampening the otherwise successful evening, March stumbles across evidence that Evo is still searching for him, and even knows that he lived in Southside Hampton Roads. His difficulty handling this information along with future lapses in discretion eventually leads JC to realize that March is, in fact, a technomancer.

15/09/72

Following the Coleman Building incident, March contacts a forger associated with the ghost cartels to provide some cheap CrashCart ID’s for the team that will be extracting Rock Salt.

16/09/72

Posing as an AI named Potomac, JC meets the man Lakdawala found, along with the runners who are being paid to extract Rock Salt and harass Dr. Ivanov. While the Johnson is laying out the opposition and their need to work with an AI for matrix overwatch, JC finds and hacks each of the team’s commlinks, though his efforts are noticed by Moreau. The runner calling herself Parker, in response to these intrusions, dubs the AI “Badger”, unfortunately for JC, the name proves to stick.

In terms of opposition, the team appears to be faced with a group of orks recruited from the Sons of Mordor street-gang and not much else. The building front is relatively non-descript, flanked by an old COX office and a small hardware store. In the back, large bay doors provide rapid entry of stretchers from an ambulance parked out back.

While the runners are doing the investigative leg-work, JC heads for the CrashCart facility, where a 20-something intern verifies his credentials and provides him with his CrashCart commlink and shows him to his office. Checking in on the team, JC, as Potomac, helps formulate a plan whereby the team will attempt to lure the orks away from the clinic by staging an underground rave called “Occupy Gondor”. While Moreau is distributing RFID chips with ads for the Occupy Gondor rave (complementary drinks, local DJ, free drugs, and hot ladies included), JC gets paged by the hospital, judging from the voice, it’s that same intern. Contacting March just in case backup’s needed, JC heads for Operating Room 3, where the perky young intern pleads with him to see to a patient, Alana Troy, known to March as Shadow. The girl’s having problems with her data filter, and her usual doctor, Dr. Gort, called out at the last minute.

Looking into Shadow’s head, JC can see the problem pretty easily, some of the gear’s components were damaged from over-heating. Oh, and there’s a cranial bomb and data lock piggy-backing on the data filter. While March looks into Dr. Gort, JC begins removing the cranial bomb, trying not to let the nurse, intern, or surgeon see him slip it into his lab coat.

Back at the surgery table, JC decrypts the data inside the data lock, with March’s help. They find a memory of Shadow watching while a retro-looking drone, dwarf and mage argue with a young, dark-haired, man. Shadow gets up to intervene as the mage suddenly petrifies the young man. The dwarf hits Shadow with a taser before she can close the distance between her and the assailants.

A review of Dr. Gort’s file shows it to be as fake as Rock Salts, but notably older. According to the file, Dr. Gort was burned terribly and relies on the suit to keep him alive, but to JC’s discerning eye, the suit seems more like a drone than a full-body containment system. Growing more suspicious, JC has March turn his attention to the intern. Data on the girl in the personnel records show she started about the same time as Gort, and provides a home address in Norfolk. Meanwhile, JC surreptitiously installs killswitches and a remote access adaptation to the data filter and data lock before repairing the damage and turning the patient back over to the surgeon.

As he returns to his office, JC realizes he needs to pull his attention elsewhere, reassuring Moreau that only two of the orks didn’t head to the rave. With Parker making her way in from the roof and Noose approaching invisibly, Moreau enters the building posing as a lawyer for a dissatisfied client. It takes substantial persuasion, but Moreau coerces the ork at the front desk to call in Dr. Ivanov. To ensure the team isn’t getting in trouble, JC, acting as Potomac, hacks the ork’s commlink and verifies the ork’s stupidity.

While wating for Dr. Ivanov, Moreau talks the ork into taking a swig from a bottle whiskey JC hadn’t even noticed was in the room. Unfortunately, the ork’s swig is timed with Ivanov’s arrival. Already irritated at being disturbed, Dr. Ivanov grows furious and, taking the bottle from the ork, slams the neck of it through the guard’s eye before gesturing for Moreau to follow him. While Parker enters the building and makes her way to Rock Salt’s room with Potomac’s guidance, the remaining ork guard locks up the rear of the building and moves to the front desk, where she takes the bottle of whiskey for a quick drink before tending to her fellow’s injury with some basic first aid.

With Rock Salt ensconced in a bed-drone, Parker uses a second bed-drone operated by Potomac to ransack the pharmaceuticals and Noose prepares a fire spirit to intercede if things go poorly. Attempts to manipulate Dr. Ivanov start going down hill when he draws a gun on Moreau. The ork ganger moves to help at the sounds of gunfire, but a quick burst of magic from Noose sends the ork, booze in tow, running from the clinic. Noose sends his fire spirit to destroy Dr. Ivanov’s records while Moreau clears out with a file on a simsense starlet, joining Parker and Rock Salt at the rear with Dr. Ivanov’s ambulance. As they’re fleeing the scene, armed orks and trolls begin swarming out of the maintenance tunnels shouting slogans like “Occupy Gondor” and “We are the goblin percent!”1.

The team, following Potomac’s directions, pick up the ID’s March obtained from the forger Serafina the drop off Rock Salt at the Chesapeake CrashCart Medical Facility, where JC installs the cyberware he’d already picked out for Rock Salt and pocketing a few pieces, with the intern’s help, for himself.

Subplots Advanced

Strange Bedfellows – this session marks the beginning of the relationship between Rock Salt and ‘Potomac’.Target March – March discovers Evo is still looking for him, and knows his general whereaboutsYou’re Not Welcome Here – JC and March discover strange implants on ShadowOccupy Gondor – This marks the beginning of the Occupy Gondor movement.

Karma & Reputation

Footnotes

1 It should be considered that the average goblin was just looking for a good time. However, one such goblin in need of a good time was Donavan, not known for non-violent good times. When orks started getting confused about what “Gondor” was, exactly, he saw fit to help direct their thinking in a manner which eventually led to their militant takeover of city hall in Norfolk. To commemorate the event, Donovan took with him a spent area-jammer that an odd looking spirit dropped into the crowd earlier.

2 I’d been mis-calculating Street Rep, Street Rep is Karma/10, round normally. So I’ll be correcting this as I go through logs.

3 Per agreement, for his backstory, JC was awarded an additional 15 karma. This little math here shows that to keep things flowing properly from log to log.

Looking at it, they do say that, for inexplicable reasons, being lucky reduces start-of-game Notoriety by one point. However, that just sounds like bullshit to me. Yes, a streak of bad luck would cause a point of Notoriety for being unreliable, but the opposite shouldn’t reduce Notoriety. But, I’ll think about it.

Well in the case of being “lucky”, the individual would be lucky in that people would pay less attention to screw ups. This also means that people are less likely to to take that same notoriety into account when the individual is trying to use it as a bonus for intimidation and the like. Those positive qualities should mean that people are less likely to believe the (bad?) rumors about you. You shouldn’t get your full notoriety bonus when intimidating if you are able to reduce your notoriety for negative situations.

It could be set up that you roll your edge to see if people take you for your notoriety or take one look at you and doubt it.

Also, do you recall where I picked up the 1 Notoriety? I was looking through the logs and up until Open Hunting Season part 3 I have 0 notoriety. I am just curious as to when and why I picked 1 point up between the beginning and Open Hunting pt3.

You’re theory on Lucky is a stretch, a really big stretch, because there are already qualities to represent people not thinking you’re a bad guy. Giving Lucky even more features than it already has is just a bad idea. Lucky doesn’t mean that people don’t think you can be an asshole, it means you have a habit for not dying.

As to where you picked up a point of Notoriety, my first guess is that we eventually remembered that you have the Enemy flaw, which grants a point of Notoriety right from the beginning. I know we forgot about it for a little while, don’t know that it was that long a while, though. Wish I had been listing totals in the karma tables from the get-go. The only other thing I could think of as a source of Notoriety would be using a rocket launcher as an anti-personnel tactic on city streets.

As for lucky, blandness, and first impression, I was just going with what sounded most plausible in the heads of the designers. I think they wanted those qualities to play out kinda like the killer rabbit from Monty Python and the holy grail. “Its just a cute fluffy rabbit, there is no way its a killer….OH GOD!!! THEBLOOD!!!”

I find myself not really caring one way or the other on it though. While it would be cool to have, it adds complexity to trying to track notoriety.

It wouldn’t actually create that much complexity in calculating Notoriety. If you look at how it’s phrased & keep it consistent with other qualities granting / reducing Notoriety, it occurs at start of game / when you get the quality.

That is, if you’ve got Blandness, but none of the “increase Notoriety” qualities, you’ve still got a Notoriety of 0, vice -1. So when you subsequently earn Notoriety in game, it’d still go up to 1.